Twitter's Geo-Tagging Spurs Experiments By Third Party Developers

(MoneyWatch)  In the week-and-a-half since Twitter rolled out its much-anticipated geo-tagging API, regular visitors to twitter.com haven't seen any evidence of it yet.

That's by design.

As a company spokesperson explained on the Twitter blog at launch, the idea was to provide developers with the tools they need to experiment with ways to geo-tag Tweets and display locations. Early examples include applications developed by Seesmic Web, which also provides a tool for realtionship-building at the micro-blogging service called Mr. Tweet.

Others experimenting with geo-tagging include Birdfeed, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twidroid. There is an iTunes app with geo-tagging at Twittelator Pro.

The company has disabled geo-tagging by default for all of its users, which means you need to "opt-in" to use it. That's easy enough to do, by visiting the Settings page and clicking on "Enable Geo-tagging" link.

So, for publishers, this heralds the beginning of a new opportunity to build out a "hyper-local" business model for content. As I noted back in August, when Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced that geo-tagging was coming:
"To me, this heralds an exciting moment for the future of hyper-local media. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a master chef to imagine the business model. Targeted ads, coupons, rebates, and special offers of all kinds can be marketed via Twitter. Potential customers can be segmented by location, transforming them into qualified leads worth many multiples of, say, your average newspaper reader."

BTW, Twitter has also updated its privacy policy to specifically include geo-tagging, which, of course, could offend some users' sense of privacy (thus the mass disabling setting of this function by default). The policy update demonstrates Twitter's continuing sensitivity to its users' needs, and stands in sharp contrast to online services that seem intent on infringing now, and explaining later.

Another notable launch recently by the social media service is "ReTweets," which have been rolled out to what Stone calls "a very small percentage of accounts" on an experimental basis.

This activity is occurring within the context of the findings by Pew Research last month that roughly one-fifth of Americans on the Internet now use Twitter or a similar service, which is up from only 11 percent in April.

According to Pew, three distinct groups are now driving this growth: "social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users (those under age 44)."

Earlier Bnet Media Post
Geo-Coded Twitter + Hyper-Local Media = CoolBiz Model